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I was much moved and felt privileged to have this opportunity to present the Eric Miller Memorial lecture. Eric was both the “father” and the “midwife” of the turn in my professional and personal career that brought me out from the consulting room to the “town square”. I am forever in debt to him and this lecture is an opportunity to recognise it.
”Miller the pillar” was one of the remarkable, unsaturated, succinct, interpretations he gave in our last joint work in a group relations conference I directed in Nazareth. We worked together in the large group, which moved more and more to a basic assumption dependency group and Eric, highly sensitised to this particular ba, offered this picture in his special cocktail of seriousness and making fun of himself, not falling into the narcissistic trap of self-aggrandisement.
In my virtual picture album there is a collage of clips of moments with Eric that made a difference: he provided us with a safe environment to develop OFEK (Organization-Person-Group—the Israeli Association for the Study of Group and Organizational Processes), coming for several years in a row, helping us with strategic planning and withdrawing gradually to let us do it alone—moving from dependency to autonomy. The last conference he participated in was “Germans and Israelis, the past in the present”, a series of conferences that he designed and worked in all of them. This one took place in Bad Segeberg, Germany, in June 2000, a short time after he was diagnosed, directing this conference and never saying a word about his condition. We understood the timeline and its meaning only after receiving his farewell letter, felt sorry for his loneliness, and admired his containment. It is with deep appreciation, love and longing, with many internalised pictures of Eric, that I wrote this presentation.